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The language of the merchants united Europe

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Linguistics

European mercantile writings document interference between languages ​​that do not appear in official literary texts. There were common codes that allowed understanding even among foreigners

by Nicola Gardini

European mercantile writings document interference between languages ​​that do not appear in official literary texts. There were common codes that allowed understanding even among foreigners

4 ‘of reading

Autumn of the Middle Ages. Various languages ​​have already been born from Latin, and Latin, not dissolved in these at all, continues to live as a language in itself, ancient and modern at the same time, always ready to adapt to circumstances, lowering and rising. What about so many languages? How do they behave with each other? Where are they? Where are they going?

Words are monumentalized

First of all, they act in the mouth of the speakers. As soon as they are pronounced, however, they disappear, without a trace, because they are essentially a sound event and a social moment. Then we find them in the scriptures, where, instead, they last, or at least are fixed with the intention of having some duration. Let us think of the status of writing par excellence, literature: where words are monumentalized in order to leave models of thought and expression to those who will be.

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But be careful: literature is not a decal of the spoken word. Literature is not made faithful and immediate orality. Some of that may even arrive on the page, but the written language is other than the spoken word or simply thought. It is never spontaneous, not even when it looks like it is, but selects and reorganizes the chosen elements according to aesthetic criteria; and it inclines towards morphological regularity, basically aiming to coincide with the very idea of ​​a national language. Therefore, especially when reading a prose or verse text from a distant time (il Decameron, the Songbooks Petrarch’sOrlando furious, the Don Quixote etc.), one should never presume to have before one’s eyes a portrait of the language of that time, but it would be more appropriate to think of having in one’s hands a hypothesis of language, a kind of “language to come”. And so? Do we have to resign ourselves to the fact that writing will never be a saying? Will there never be a coincidence between the two practices? Will literature always be the eternity of an irremediable inconsistency?

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The merchants

Fortunately, there are merchants. They too write, and not a little. Archives and libraries from all over the continent preserve memorials, letters, contracts, deeds. As much literature intentionally detaches itself from the spoken word as much as commercial writing approaches it out of empirical necessity, and therefore incorporates, mixes, juxtaposes heterogeneous elements, rejecting norms and codes, and arriving at spectacular hybridizations. We find an evocative fresco of this other trend in the essay by Lorenzo Tomasin Romance Europe, recently published by Einaudi. A scrupulous philologist and at the same time refined, admirable news organizer, Tomasin seems to applaud with equal enthusiasm the synecdoche method that Erich Auerbach brought to perfection in Mimesis and analogous to that of micro-historical scholars. He therefore chooses certain emblematic cases, which correspond to certain personalities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, two women and four men (Guglielma Venier, Pietro d’Alamanno, Bondí de Iosef, Bartol de Cavalls, Isabelle Hamerton, Henri de Praroman), all somehow exponents of the mercantile class, all recovered from obscurity, all of different nationalities, and, starting from a sample of their writing, he makes paradigms of verbal contamination. Therefore, he moves from the specific situation of each one to the scrutiny of more general ideas: the progressive marginalization of Latin, the export of French and Italian, the use of translations, the birth of dictionaries.

In detail, from place to place, from individual to individual, a transnational society is outlined in which the practice of mingling is conspicuous and demonstrates that it concerns much wider communication spaces that do not indicate only the findings examined. Words, idioms, casts, maccharonisms pass from one vulgar to another and mingle with the prevailing vulgar creating a composite space, which seems to ignore the very concept of linguistic identity, both nationally and personally. The lexical and grammatical normativity, as Tomasin well underlines, is a result of literature. It arises from the theories of the educated and the consequent normalization campaigns, such as the success of the Bembian principles, in Italy, is there to prove. Merchants’ writing, on the other hand, instinctively refuses to constrain languages ​​within geo-political boundaries. Nor is it just contamination and interference between languages, as the documents attest, but it is plausible that in certain contexts certain individuals could understand each other even in the absence of a common code or express themselves, with varying degrees of mastery, in the foreign language of the ‘interlocutor.

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